Why The Velvet Underground & Nico Is Still Lou Reed's Best

Lou Reed died yesterday, putting an end to a career nearly 50 years long that challenged and confounded rock listeners (and provided music journalists with a wealth of material) right up to the very end. While his musical output could be erratic, veering from hostile electronic noise to mawkish sentimentality at the drop of a hat, everything he did was executed with such borderline-megalomaniacal assuredness and such flair that it was never anything less than totally fascinating: You couldn't turn away, even when the music itself was unlistenable.

Of course Lou could get away with that kind of thing, and with cultivating a legendarily cocky bad attitude, because he made a couple of records that came as close to perfection as any rock record ever has, beginning with 1967's The Velvet Underground & Nico. Last year Universal released a six-disc super-deluxe reissue of it that proved despite whatever dulling effects acceptance into the mainstream rock canon may have inflicted upon it (the kind of thing that inspires six-disc super-deluxe reissues), it still retains a remarkable amount of the edge that it had when it was first released.

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Right now the most popular Lou Reed quote on my Twitter timeline is, "One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz." The Velvet Underground & Nico hewed closer to this philosophy than anything else he ever recorded. "I'm Waiting for the Man" is a jittery, skeletal distillation of mid-'60s teenybopper pop. "Heroin" stretches two chords into a seven-minute-long hallucinatory experience. Compared to the posh embroidered psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the same year, The Velvet Underground & Nico feels like a shiv carved from a toothbrush, crude and simple but lethally effective.

Of course Lou broke his own rules as readily as he did anyone else's, and when he and the band weren't laying down the foundations for punk rock that are still being built on today, they were making tender ballads that use enough chords to qualify as jazz under his snarky definition. He may have complained loudly and at great length about having been stuck with an untrained singer with a pretty face, but Nico helped Reed to channel his substantial soft side without resorting to any of the sarcasm, arch theatrics, and other devices that he'd use in later years to maintain a safe distance from real vulnerability. "Sunday Morning," "I'll Be Your Mirror," and the rest of Nico's ballads on The Velvet Underground remain some of the all-time sweetest entries in the rock songbook.

For all of its manic twists and turns, Reed's career still rests on his debut album, and it's the one that people have naturally turned to in order to mark his passing. While it might seem fitting somehow to spin one of his more blatantly antagonistic records (if for no other reason than to imagine Lou in the afterlife smiling at the fact that he's still pissing listeners off), this seems like the best thing. If you don't already have the massive six-disc set of The Velvet Underground & Nico, you can find it on Spotify now. Skip the stereo mix and go straight to the mono remaster, which packs the noise in more densely and rewards the listener with a more fully sensory-overloading experience. It has a menacing electrical presence that no other record of the time can approach. Reach out and touch it and you'll find that it can still shock.